Comment 112250

By myrcurial (registered) - website | Posted June 15, 2015 at 12:04:43

I think that we're back to a zeroth problem...

The city cannot be trusted with modest low complexity IT tasks. Do not even start on high complexity IT tasks. (And if you want to talk about goofy IT, have a look at McMaster's ERM 'project').

It is time for the city to admit that concerned and interested citizens can build better/faster IT projects if we are supplied with the data. Heck, we can even transform from weird proprietary formats if it's deemed too difficult to achieve open formats.

Here's the killer... it would really only take a mobile app that can guide a user through making a report that dumps to JIRA/equivalent-issue-tracker for a workflow that runs each report through a public works staffer for prioritization, then let the work commence. You can even do the reporting engine with nothing more than a structured email -- to: issuetracker, subject: municipal address, body: description, attachments: photographs -- heck, it'd probably even fit into the 10 user JIRA license. And if you use something less nice (request tracker comes to mind), you can work this thing out for the cost of a pair of hosted servers - ie: effectively zero.

Sigh.

The downside of dealing with this sort of problem (information management) for a day job is that it is too easy to design the problem out and then expect for normal people to just get along instead of arguing about how it can't be done.

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